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THE NOVEL LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN

A GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY

A treat for the international army of Janeites.

A graphic biography spotlights three key episodes in the quiet existence that fueled seven wicked comedies of manners.

Greenberg’s sprightly illustrations generally favor a muted blue-gray-yellow color scheme that bursts into vivid reds and purples when Austen imagines scenes in her novels. Part 1, in the late 1790s, chronicles several visits to Bath with her beloved sister Cassandra. Tart correspondence and conversational asides about their garrulous mother and other relatives (of whom she was fond while gently mocking their quirks) display the sly humor Austen developed in her fiction. It was unappreciated by publishers in that period, when she was disheartened by the rejection of Pride and Prejudice. In Part 2 the family moves to Bath after Reverend Austen retires, and their already modest circumstances become straitened after his death in January 1805. Jenny and Cassy, as the sisters call each other, are now past 30 and know they are unlikely to marry; they are forced to move with their mother into brother Frank’s home in Southampton. Tours of ruins and everyday domestic scenes show Austen’s sharp eye at work and nicely capture the modest details from which she crafted her brilliant novels. The appealing combination of drawings and text encourages an affection for her that will lead readers to sigh with relief when the Austen women are able to relocate to more comfortable quarters on the Hampshire estate of their wealthy brother Edward in Part 3. With more privacy and time to write, Austen finally becomes a published author with Sense and Sensibility in 1811. There’s nothing terribly new in this low-key portrait, but the focus on selected episodes gives a nice sense of the texture of Austen’s daily life.

A treat for the international army of Janeites.

Pub Date: April 29, 2025

ISBN: 9780762489374

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025

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TANQUERAY

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

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A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

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MARK TWAIN

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

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A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.

It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

Pub Date: May 13, 2025

ISBN: 9780525561729

Page Count: 1200

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025

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